The announcement of gas giant Gazprom to cut gas to Europe on Friday night is not fortuitous: just a few hours before, the G7 had announced the imposition of a ceiling on the price of Russian oil to limit the income that the Kremlin obtained from its sales abroad. Moscow says, between the lines, that where they give it, they take it. The use of Russian energy resources as pressure measurement to the European Union has been materializing throughout this year, since the Russian army was deployed in Ukraine.
The Eurasian country earns large revenues from its hydrocarbons, mostly from the Arctic and the Caspian Sea. According to data from the World Trade Organization, in 2019 about 60% of exports were fuels and other mining products, including oil and gas. The combination of large hydrocarbon reserves and high European dependence is the Kremlin’s great card to put pressure on Europe, just as it is doing now with the EU. 29% of the oil, 43% of the gas and 54% of the coal imported into the EU countries come from the Eurasian giant. In all three cases, Russia is the largest supplier, above respectively USA (9%), y Norway (21%).
As an official excuse to cut off the gas supply, Gazprom said on Saturday that Siemens was ready to carry out repairs on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline and resume operation, but that no operator was available to carry out the work. Siemens has responded immediately and has denied such extreme, assuring that they had not asked him to do the work.
It’s not the first time that Russian gas is used as a missile weapon by Moscow. One of the most recent examples is that of Moldova, which at the end of 2021 saw the threat of closing the gas tap looming at the harshest time of winter (temperatures can reach -7º in the country at that time of the year) about to arrive. With the prices prior to the new agreement there were already citizens who they couldn’t payand the options they had was to borrow in winter to pay for gas in summer use it firewood. The reason given by Gazprom, which has a monopoly on Moldovan supplies, was disagreement with the Moldovan authorities, who wanted to keep an affordable price. Finally, a new agreement was signed in November that allowed Chisinau to continue receiving hydrocarbons, at a higher price and not without concessions of another nature that have nothing to do with gas. The country is one of the poorest in Europe and this rise was paid for by the most vulnerable layers of Moldovan society, already struggling to meet its basic needs.
aim Dionysus the Ashpolitical analyst at the Moldovan Expert Group think tank, that “the Moldovan government insisted that it has not accepted any political price (for this agreement), but the protocol added to the new contract gas includes cooperation aspects bilateral economy beyond the energy domain”. He adds that “Russia wants a cooperation platform with Moldova so as not to lose sight of it. In Moscow it was perfectly understood that (before its admission as an EU candidate) the country was deepening the dialogue with the EU”.
Gas war in Ukraine
If you look a little further back in time, Ukraine itself suffered from the problem of running out of gas in the middle of winter. Between the years 2000 and 2010 there were the so-called “gas wars”, during which Russia stopped supplying gas. The first of these began on January 1, 2006. The pressure in the gas pipelines began to drop and other countries such as France, Germany, Slovakia and Hungary saw their supplies affected. On January 4 when an agreement was finally signed. On that occasion, the trigger was the lack of agreement on the price of gas, but in the background there were also the political quarrels between the Kremlin and the government of Viktor Yushchenko, who wanted to get closer to Brussels, to the detriment of Moscow. Even on two more occasions (beginning of 2008 and the end of the same year) Gazprom suspended supplies to kyiv, damaging in the crossfire to other euro countries.